I stepped back into the men’s room, farted again, and opened the envelope. I didn’t count the money, but it was somewhere around $25,000 in hundreds. Nobody had ever laid a bundle like that on me before, ever. I held it in my two hands like a newborn baby. I owed two grand in back rent to my landlady, Doris, and half a grand on my tab at the Five Spot, and $1,500 to a herkimer-jerkimer named Norman Schwandt to cover my losses on a particularly disastrous game of high-stakes Scrabble when Mr. Schwandt, a complete imbecile, pulled the word zygote out of his butt.
Paying off my debts would leave $21,000 for me. (No need to involve the IRS in the deal.) I was tempted to walk away with the dough and make a new start somewhere. Like Alaska, for example. Alaska is a top destination for fugitives. Rotgut sinners fly to Alaska and become Sunday school teachers; certified lunatics go into public service. Or I could return to the Upper West Side and find a sub-sublet and get a job at the Thalia selling popcorn and look forward to the next Richard Widmark Film Festival.
NO, I SAID TO MYSELF, drawing myself up to my full six feet, one-and-one-half inches, I shall stay and do battle with Mr. Larry. Pure avarice is what drew me into the fray. Having an envelope fat with cash makes a man long to have even fatter envelopes. Whole bricks of crisp hundred-dollar bills packed into crates, a cool million in each crate, a row of crates stacked head high. Money, money, money, money, money. So I peeled off five hundreds and laid them on the bar on the way out. “Thanks for the tab,” I said. And pulled off another hundred—“That’s for you, pal.” Jimmy held it up to the light. “Thanks,” he said. “Anytime.” He blinked. Me paying my bar tab: a historic moment. “You working for the dame?” I nodded. “You need an assistant?” he said. I shook my head. He poured a finger of twenty-year-old single-malt called Old No. 69 into a glass and pushed it at me. “On the house.” A whiskey like Scotland herself, cloudy, bitter, judgmental, an aftertaste like chemotherapy. I held it in my hand to warm it and let the gravel and peat fragments settle. I took a sip and felt a great heat in the back of my mouth. Another burst of memory. Sugar O’Toole and a summer night in Duluth and the taste of her kisses after we’d swum in Lake Superior near the iron ore discharge. But that’s another story.
5
Waiting for Mr. Larry
I HUSTLED BACK TO THE Acme and stashed the tapeworm queens in my file cabinet, the Q-T drawer, and tucked the cell-phone/pepper-gas gizmo into a manila envelope marked STAMP COLLECTION: AVOID DAMPNESS. The wad of hundreds I clung to for a few minutes, fanning them, patting them, brushing them against my lips, my cheeks. What crispness and delicacy in a hundred-dollar bill that is fresh and uncrumpled. It breathes of possibility as plastic never can. Down below in the alimentary canal, my tenants were making themselves comfortable. In the Brew Ha Ha on my way in, I had picked up a cinnamon roll the size of a softball, and I could feel their excitement when it came tumbling down the chute. Fifteen minutes later I was still hungry. I ordered a pizza from Papa Rossi, a large pepperoni, extra cheese, and devoured that, and still was hungry, so I picked up a quart of spumoni and some macaroons and scarfed that up, went home, weighed myself, and I was two pounds lighter.
I handed Doris the $2,000 I owed her, and of course she lit into me. A simple “Thank you very much” would’ve been beyond her. “What am I supposed to do with this? Where’d you swipe this? Off a blind newsboy? Are the bills marked? Why can’t you write a check? You expect me to go deposit this in the bank? As if I’ve got nothing else to do! And now I suppose you’re expecting me to write you a receipt!! My God, what a day.” She’s a great complainer, that Doris, and also she likes to have you in hock to her and in her clutches. She stuffed the bills into her purse. “Oh, by the way,” she said. “A guy named Larry B. Larry came around for you.”
“What’d he say?”
“Oh, and now I’m your secretary????” She shook her head as if it were all too much for words, getting a wad of cash and being asked a simple question. “He said he’s going to come back and hammer some sense into you. He wanted to go up and wait for you in your room, and I told him no. He had a friend with him, a skinny fellow, gray-haired. Suit-and-tie guy. Gynecologist named Buddy.”
“Thanks for not letting him stay around.”
“A gynecologist, Mr. Noir! What—you get some girl in trouble?” Then she looked me over up close. “If so, it must’ve been at gunpoint,” she said. “So—you’re up for first-degree rape. Just promise me this. When the cops come, don’t make them knock the door down, okay? Give yourself up. Plead the Fifth and hope you get a decent public defender. I hope the girl wasn’t underage. If so, don’t expect me to be a character witness. No way.”
“Doris, there was no rape and these are not cops. These are hoodlums and they don’t knock doors down. They riddle them with bullet holes in a fusillade of hot lead, and afterward there’s a funeral at which women in black mantillas weep into their hankies that they pull from their bosoms.”
“I don’t have a black mantilla, and I don’t have a bosom either. Thought you would’ve noticed by now.”
I shooed her away and flopped down on my bed. I wasn’t in the mood to meet the enemy yet. I needed a strategy. I thought maybe Joey could be useful if I needed some muscle, or maybe Joey Junior. He is 437 pounds and has Percheron legs and a neck like a concrete block. He is a mild-mannered fellow, but if you leaned him up against a Larry B. Larry and told him to shimmy, he could do some real damage.
I was writing Joey a note—“Thank you for paying me a nice visit to collect money for St. Bernard’s School, which I know is dear to your heart. I am enclosing a check for $500 and hope this helps with the new gymnasium”—counting on his dementia to have wiped the slate clean, when a guy in a hideous green plaid jacket and eyebrows the size of laboratory mice walked in. The scuff marks on his wingtips and the flecks of what appeared to be tofu on his shirtfront, plus the slight indentation in his right index finger where a pencil rested when he wrote up the check, told me he was a waiter in a natural foods restaurant. But he turned out to be my accountant, Marvin Hansom, making a surprise visit.
“To what do I owe the honor?” I said.
“Your checking account is a black hole, Guy. It’s antimatter. Don’t touch it, or you’re liable to wind up in a six-by-seven-foot cell with a hard bunk and a toilet with no seat.”
“I’m on the gravy train, Marvin. I’m flush. Riding high.”
“You’re on the graveyard train. Your total assets are about enough to get you to Moline, Illinois.”
“I’m on the verge of turning the corner.”
“It isn’t a corner, it’s a cliff. And you went over it a long time ago. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But you’re broke. Plus which, you owe me two hundred bucks. Guy, the handwriting is on the wall. The fickle finger of fate has written. Fini. Caput. Time to find yourself a paying job, maybe something in Housewares.”
So I reached into my inside jacket pocket and withdrew the hundreds, and he fingered it, intrigued, I could tell. An accountant and all, with his rational biases and his numerology, and yet here was a wad of cash. “How did you glom onto this?” he inquired.
“As it happens, a fabulous opportunity has fallen in my capacious lap, and I’ve become a partner in a plan to sell a weight-loss drug that the American people have been waiting for.”
“Aha,” he said. I could hear the sprockets turning in his brain, the cogs meshing, the bevel gear turning the worm wheel. “Do you have a contract on paper, signed and notarized?”
I chuckled. “I am in partnership with someone whom I trust implicitly. I’ve taken a dose of the meds myself and lost three pounds in the past three hours despite stuffing myself with animal fats. If this drug works the way I think it will, I’m going to be enormously rich and moving up into a lower tax bracket.”
He wanted to tell me I was wrong, wrong, wrong, but he was also considering what might be in it for
him. His 10 percent fee for managing my 2 percent of a successful weight-loss drug might be enough to buy him the divorce he longed for and a diamond ring for the receptionist he adored, a big strapping girl named Chantal Smythe whom he met in a chat room called Married but Still Looking and took out on a date that lasted for seventy-two hours, most of it spent in a motel frequented by accountants called Cyrano’s, in a room with a vibrating bed and a Jacuzzi with a mirror on the ceiling overhead surrounded by a string of pink Christmas bulbs. A private eye knows these things.
“I am done with the snoop business, Marvin my man. And if you want to be on my team, you have to do more than add up numbers.”
He looked at me and blinked.
“You’re going to have to poke your finger in people’s chests and yell in their faces.”
“Yell at women?”
“All kinds. I may need an agent. A go-between. A mouthpiece.”
I’d just gotten a text message from a woman who needed somebody to yell at her, and to me it was proof positive that the time had come to retire from the field of private investigation.
She texted as follows:
It’s like this, Mr. Noir. The man in my Adult Bible Study Group with whom I was having an affair decided he was gay and ran away with my husband, and our dog Godfrey went with them. I knew that the pizza delivery boy had a crush on me, and so we started fooling around, though he is 19 and I am 51. But he is mature for his age. One night Joe (my husband) returned to pick up his camping gear, and he and the delivery boy, Matt, who is not well disposed toward gays, got into a shoving match, and Orv (Joe’s lover, formerly my lover) came after Matt, and I threw a toaster at him, and the neighbors came over, and their dog went after Godfrey, and the cops arrived and told us all to shut up. It was just one thing after another. My pastor Thorstein heard the whole story (we live in a small town) and was surprisingly sympathetic and not judgmental at all. He told me not to worry about it, that everything would be okay. I said, “Are you kidding? I feel terrible. Lives have been blighted, innocent people hurt, and it’s my fault. I committed adultery.” He said, “It happens all the time.” I said, “What kind of a lousy pastor are you? Ever hear of the Ten Commandments?” He said, “We’re all about mercy and forgiveness.” I said, “What about contrition?” He was so smug, I just plain lost my temper and whacked him upside the head with a ballpeen hammer and ran him off, and that was the night the church burned down. I don’t think I set it afire, but I can’t be sure. I have been known to walk in my sleep. And the next morning when I awoke, I smelled of smoke. What should I do? Sincerely, Nora
In a rash moment, I texted back to her:
Darling, I’m driving to Montana to take up trout farming and don’t expect to be solving any more cases for a while, not even ones as interesting as yours, due to a fondness for Scotch, thus the decision to relocate to a state where drunk driving is considered a normal part of life. But if you would be interested in exploring a romantic relationship, I am 65, weigh 220 pounds (lie, closer to 238), am 6 foot 11/2, have green eyes and thinning gray hair, and enjoy skating along the edge of mortal danger, which, judging by your letter, you do, too. I’m no spring chicken, but what I lack in agility, I make up for in skill and enthusiasm. Do not be fooled by the dry tone of this missive. I am a tiger. Be in touch. Xoxox Guy Noir
“Why I wrote that, Marvin, I can’t tell you, but now she’s sending me mash notes and sighing into my voice mail. I need management. Someone who will yell at me when I get off the beam.” He promised to think it over and I paid him his $200 and he left to go see Chantal.
6
A tempting offer
NAOMI WAS A HARD WORKER. In two weeks, she wrote a memoir, Why I Tried To Kill a Man, How I Went Free, Why I Would Do It Again, which, at the urging of her publisher, she turned into a novel, The Bright Side of Homicide, which came out in April and shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list thanks in part to the cover, a photograph of her that when you tilted it to and fro, she jiggled and shook her hips and licked her lower lip. I caught her late one night on C-SPAN explaining that violence is only a way of recontextualizing contradictions and creating a new trajectory in the allegory of good and evil. The guy interviewer seemed stunned to hear the word “allegory” from a dame with such beautiful bazooms. The book earned her a truckload of money, plus the cash flow from tapeworm sales must have been considerable, because a steady series of lovely checks dropped through the mail slot of Suite 1235, Acme Building, drawn on the Chase Manhattan Bank and payable to me, for $50,000 apiece, which I endorsed and dropped off at First National, where Charlene the cashier grinned—“You sure have an eye for those ponies, Mr. Noir!”—and counted me out ten hundreds, and off I went, happy as a mutt with a fresh porterhouse, and stopped at the Five Spot for a celebratory martini. Jimmy held the hundred-dollar bill up to the light and said, “You got yourself one damn fine printing press, Guy. Looks almost real to me.” I dropped in at Candyland and bought five pounds of pecan turtles for the Sisters of Mercy and swung by Mariucci’s Steakhouse, and old John showed me to a corner table under the big pictures of him in his Chicago Black Hawk days and punched me in the shoulder and brought me the usual—giant shrimp cocktail, sixteen-ounce New York strip, rare, twice-baked potato with sour cream, apple pie with cheese, and a Rusty Nail for the road.
“How do you do it?” he said. “Live the high life and still keep your boyish figure?”
“Plenty of sleep and plenty of exercise, John. I sleep with all the women I can, and we exercise together.”
He grinned and we bumped fists, and off I toddled into the night, rich and—if the glances of beautiful women were any indication—attractive, and both with so little effort on my part. I had scraped along for years, keeping my head above water, and now, no sweat, I was airborne. I bought clothes in smaller and smaller sizes. Old suits went off to Goodwill, and I switched over to jeans, black T-shirt, and herringbone jacket. I considered madras shorts, but my legs have weird hair patterns that look as if I reached puberty near a nuclear power plant. So I stuck with jeans, the expensive ones, French labels, prefaded in Provence.
I STARTED EXERCISING. I HIRED a personal trainer, Rochelle, who had me doing crunches and push-ups and lunges and taking long brisk walks as she held a stopwatch. She drove me hard. She’d been an army drill instructor, and abuse was her stock in trade. “Step up the pace, pork pie!” she yelled. “I want to see those love handles jiggle, want to see the dewlaps bounce, piglet! Go, go, go!” I loved her. I worked harder and harder to impress her. She yelled, “Jump, babykins! Hop and skip and then drop to the ground and give your mama a hundred crunches and fifty cherry pickers. Go, fat boy! Let’s see you sweat!”
I stopped trying to finesse my bald spot with a combover and I shaved my head and started wearing dark glasses and using a powerful cologne called SOB, and suddenly I was like a prime rib at a piranha picnic. Women hit on me without shame. A seminarian named Cecily walked up at the Ha Ha and said, “You turn me on, mister.” I pointed to the Bible under her arm. “Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“Come to my condo and I’ll show you.”
IT IS PECULIAR, BEING AN object of sexual hunger for younger women and also knowing that a Larry B. Larry is gunning for you. Love and death in the same room, each one raising the drama of the other.
I met a lissome young photographer named Zuzu—she strode over to me in the Ha Ha and said, “I want to know you.” And said she wanted to shoot pictures of me. “You don’t mind posing in the nude, do you?” She got right to the point. She was tall and blond, except she’d dyed the roots brunette, an original touch. She put her hand on mine and invited me to come to her studio in the Rossmor Building and shoot a few and see what happens—“Nakedness can be tasteful, don’t you think?” And I looked out the window to see my enemy slouching nearby in
a soiled trench coat, and he leered at me. And she said, “And afterward we can sit and have a glass of Pernod.”
She went on ahead to turn up the thermostat, and I headed for the Beethoven to check on Louie Louey, and I climbed up over a ridge of snow on the corner of Ninth and Robert, and someone behind me chuckled, which distracted me, and I slipped, and had it not been for my training in the tango, I might’ve dislocated a disk and entered the Dark Valley of Therapy in a nursing facility, where Larry B. Larry would find me, helpless, an easy target for his devious schemes, but I kept my balance, and the adrenaline hit the worms in my gut like an electric charge. They started dancing like the Rockettes. I ducked into Danny’s Deli, looking both ways to make sure I was not being followed, and ordered a pastrami on rye to quiet them down, and before Danny could mention my tab, I thrust five hundred dollars at him and then another hundred—“Thanks for your support, pal.” He got tears in his eyes. “I had forgotten all about that,” he said. “Friends don’t owe me nothing. Your friendship is what’s of value to me, my man. Appreciate it, though.” And he tucked the dough into his apron pocket.
“Larry B. Larry was in here asking about you,” he said. “Came in five minutes ago. You just missed him.”
“And I hope to go on missing him.”
He stacked about a pound of pastrami onto the rye and injected mustard and sliced it diagonally and gave me a cream soda on the house, and just the smell of pastrami got the worms excited. I sat down in the corner, where I could observe the front door. I took a big bite and fed the tenants, and a guy at the table behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You mind not chewing so loud? It sounds like a horse eating oats.”
He was a little guy with no chin and hound dog eyes, bald on top with a fringe around the roof, red vest, white pants. He looked like the director of a kazoo band. “No need to make a big production of it,” he said.
Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Page 5